Grassroots activists whose energy and donations have helped to propel Barack Obama towards the White House are suddenly choking on the bitter pill of disillusion.

In less than a month since clinching the Democratic nomination, he has performed a series of policy pirouettes to assuage concerns about his candidacy among a wider and more conservative electorate.

It is change, but not the type for which many of those who enthusiastically supported Mr Obama during the primaries had hoped.

The biggest group on Mr Obama's own web portal was one pleading with him yesterday to vote against domestic wire-tapping of terror suspects, which gives phone companies immunity from prosecution for past misdeeds.
cannot be crossed.” On Thursday, Mr Obama posted his own message on the site, saying he was “happy to take my lumps” because democracy could not exist without dissent. While some people may view his position as a deal-breaker, he said, “our agreement on the vast majority of issues that matter outweighs the differences”.

Grassroots activists whose energy and donations have helped to propel Barack Obama towards the White House are suddenly choking on the bitter pill of disillusion.

In less than a month since clinching the Democratic nomination, he has performed a series of policy pirouettes to assuage concerns about his candidacy among a wider and more conservative electorate.

It is change, but not the type for which many of those who enthusiastically supported Mr Obama during the primaries had hoped.

The biggest group on Mr Obama's own web portal was one pleading with him yesterday to vote against domestic wire-tapping of terror suspects, which gives phone companies immunity from prosecution for past misdeeds.
cannot be crossed.” On Thursday, Mr Obama posted his own message on the site, saying he was “happy to take my lumps” because democracy could not exist without dissent. While some people may view his position as a deal-breaker, he said, “our agreement on the vast majority of issues that matter outweighs the differences”.

And why not? What's the downside? He won't lose the left, or even mainstream Democrats. They won't stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush, anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their day of revenge -- for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the past eight years.

Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.